whatchu playing now

discovered that remote play via ps vita works like a dream for mlb the show, so i'm now workshopping every surface in my apt to determine which is the most comfortable spot to grind out seasons in my franchise.

oh shit i haven't tried that yet. that's my monday night now!

but what i have taken to doing is, when playing long marathon sessions of mgsv, when i want to have a smoke i plug headphones into the controller, and listen to tapes on it while outside. i may remote play into it so i can listen to other ones when in bed. i have so many left to listen to and i like doing it but when i am sitting on the couch i would rather be playing, you know?

also they sound so much tape-ier on headphones

caveat to my previous post - i found pitching to be most conducive when not using the meter for remote play. i couldn't quite get the timing down and it was a little hard to see so i switched back to classic pitching (haven't attempted the other modes). given that pitching is m/l easier than hitting i was ok w/ the tradeoff

I just got MLB the show a few weeks ago. Pretty fun

welp i just played through Beginner's Guide and i did NOT like it. not to piss on anyone's take, but it seemed mawkish and didactic to the point of boredom. Like playing through a bad podcast. As a meditation on depression and how to deal with your own and others, this was simultaneously obvious and cryptic. The gameplay did not improve the story and the story was exhausting soon enough. just not for me.

I don't disagree with any of that.

I've seen a few articles since playing it (Laura H's up there included) where the player started out assuming Coda was real and reacted to it on that basis before coming to the realisation that actually he probably wasn't (or even where they don't appear to have decided he wasn't real at all). I assumed he wasn't real from the start, and feel like maybe I spoiled it for myself slightly by not falling for the central conceit that way?

― JimD, Monday, October 5, 2015 5:25 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha i was waiting the whole time for wreden to explicitly say -- 'coda and the narrator are TWO PARTS OF MYSELF, DON'T YOU SEE?' -- the game seems to beg for that kind of reading whilst also being too obscure to really say much (except for the last kind of tiresome cri de coeur -- so, yeah, like forks says "simultaneously obvious and cryptic"

finished last of us this weekend - going to play the dlc soon. been playing lots of the curious expedition.

you paid for it? does it have hidden depths?

it's fun - i've gotten a lot of gameplay out of it. idk if i'd call them hidden depths but it does have some interesting things going on (and it reminds me a lot of ftl)

last of us dlc was good. currently playing shadows of mordor (ps4), binding of isaac rebirth expansion afterbirth, cities: skylines (um am i wrong or is this super easy and consequently kinda boring?), king of dragon pass, mercenary kings (thx forks, this game is cool)

yr welcome

beat River City Ransom for NES earlier today

that's what's up

ok so i mentioned this in the fallout 4 thread because i don't know how to stay on topic ever

but i got nba 2k16. reason: i want to understand basketball, and don't, and thought this might help

i am fucking... LOST. i do not know how to play this game, or how 5-on-5 basketball starts. how do i learn these things? aside from watching basketball with a fan, because that's hard, because i don't know any?

Start here:

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/basics/basics.html

http://videorulebook.nba.com/

Playing NBA2K a few years ago for the first time taught me an enormous amount about basketball that I never understood. Keep at it, it can be very rewarding. Unfortunately I don't have any great tips either besides grinding through career mode which feels like a totally different game from 5-on-5 mode of NBA2K. Because your character is so bad at the beginning, you're kind of forced to make better percentage plays, off-ball defense, doing good teamwork plays that don't involve scoring, moving the ball, pick and rolls, and so on.

Maybe play some NBA Jam or etc. before you dig into the deeper simulation style of 2K

Time of Exploration for android

just about as simple as it gets

i'm playing marble madness: http://www.twitch.tv/weinventyou

going for the record.sorta.

fuck it, doing SMB3 again, world 6

Gta3 on iPad. Controls not as bad as I thought but I can't get past bomb da base. Sniper rifle pretty essential and the controls while using the scope horribly unresponsive.

Ninja gaiden now because why not

i just got witcher 3, is my life over y/n

Worms 2 Armageddon this evening. L is kicking my backside.

JUST ONE MORE ROUND OF GWENT BEFORE SLEEP

*ten hours later trying to lead a goat back to its master using a small bell with work alarm fast approaching*

Witcher 3 is awesome and sucked in two months of my time that I deliberately held out to fininsh til FO4 hit. It's interesting to compare CD Projeckt Red's version of an open-world game with, say, Warner Bros Games. Compare & contrast it with Shadow of Morder or Mad Max.

Right now, playing FO4 all the time, but varied up just a little with Mad Max(a great purchase if you get it for like $25 USD or less for PC). Will try Rocket League again just to play with the new additions.

Will probably burn-out of FO4 before the DLCs hit, and will probably switch over to MGSV come holiday season, assuming Amazon has it on sale for Black Friday.

Oh wait, there's a 2D free game on Steam called Endless Sky which I was fiddling with. It's a modern update to Escape Velocity.

Is that like Transcendence? (Which up until now I had no idea was even on Steam)

sw battlefront. it is a very pretty game, a little shallow content wise but a definite used-copy buy imo.

the ship combat is especially enjoyable

crypt of the necrodancer. what a frustratingly almost-good game!

I also played though link to the past and ffiv for the first time ever. Kinda wish I hadn't.

ffiv not compelling if you've never played it? had it on my list

xp whoa u weren't into lttp? that's in my top 3 probably

probably gone through that game 15-20 times in my life

LTTP is great but i tried to replay it about a decade ago, the endgame is kind of a slog
actually, i quit FFV for similar reasons (my party was under-leveled for the final boss, never beat it)

lttp i found less enjoyable in the overworld reveal and dungeon design than i did links awakening. or than i did my memory of links awakening, anyway, which i guess makes it harder to compete with. the hitting things with your sword aspects probably have a little more depth to them but i don't really play zelda for that i guess. also of the five times i got stuck one was an actual puzzle and the rest were variations on 'hit the wall with the sword'.

ffiv i had much much lower expectations of and i guess enjoyed more as a result. it helped that i was playing the gba version, which is i. prettier ii. faster iii. really broken.

I don't feel that grindy RPGs have aged well. My recent attempts at playing Final Fantasys I loved in my youth have all been underwhelming.

v little grinding in this edition of iv

but i got nba 2k16. reason: i want to understand basketball, and don't, and thought this might help

Hilarious because I did the same thing with Madden. Except that I can at least kinda follow what's happening in basketball but I have zero clue wtf is happening in football. I'll have to return to that project somedeay.

Playing the OG Ratchet and Clank just now. It's pretty fun, but the thing where it's super breezy and like beginner-level easy for a long time and then suddenly out of nowhere SUPER HARD is kinda knocking me for a loop. I finally won the hoverboard race after 800 attempts and now I'm stuck on some underwater tunnel where I've drowned 800 times already.

interesting, if i had more time i'd thinking about trying this for basketball too. for football the latest madden is a kinda bad/frustrating game but the one thing that i did like is that the tutorial mode actually goes surprisingly deep on what is happening on a given play so that you understand what a particular offensive or defensive play is trying to accomplish. i don't know how useful a madden game would be for learning the basics but for the level of understanding beyond that and getting to know the players i could see the new one being valuable. also the game i am sure would be less annoying if you are more nooby and have different expectations.

im also in the "lttp is kinda ovverrated" camp fwiw but i have a bit of a chip on my shoulder abt every selda game i've played becase IDGI

like if people laud your puzzles where the solution is "use yr new toy" i just can't get on board

I find Zelda games kind of frustrating.

- Precise platforming where dying is more punitive than instructive
- Puzzles that sometimes rely on sharply observing details in low-res graphical environments
- Getting stuck on a puzzle often leaves you with nothing to do
- Bosses that create absurd difficulty spikes that can't be prepared for, death means a tedious slog back to the boss
- Every game is the same

And yet I've played most of them and Ocarina of Time is in my top three (only one I've ever finished, loved it to buts every minute)

Err, that should have read "loved it to bits"

- Getting stuck on a puzzle often leaves you with nothing to do

so this was sort of and sort of not how i felt about lttp. like, i realised that playing it with every solution an alt-tab away is not what the game requires, or is designed for. the idea is you will get stuck and go and wander around the game world and kill some time, i think, and come back stronger, but also having explored and soaked up atmosphere. particularly for the last few dungeons, and getting to the last boss, which require random shit one finds in odd corners of the dark world.

link's awakening, which is way better, has that ultimate puzzle of this sort, where there's this shaggy-dog eternal item-swapping fetch quest that seems like a total joke and you can't progress without having done it like eight times. and yet i want to defend this as a high-risk piece of game design. well.

(it also has better dungeons.)

so i've more or less come around to the idea that crypt of the necrodancer sucks, anyone else play it? not sucks exactly. just every half hour of play you get to some gtfo design idea. particularly the bosses, particularly the last boss sequence, where you fight an apparent boss who has a very non-transparent solution, followed by an actual final boss who requires you to do smth mechanically different to the entire rest of the game, and then in his second phase requires you to kill him with a weapon you can't have picked up to practice before this point which is mechanically different from the entire rest of the game, while also doing the other thing which is mechanically different from the rest of the game

also the system where it adjusts the 'beat' you have to hit so it can fall on not-the-actual-beat is really annoying and stupid and wrong, because if you go 'oh shit i'm way off, i'm going to stop and listen for the beat' you are totally fucked

i've still played it for eight hours

the internet seems to indicate that it took most people way longer than eight hours to get to the stupid last boss which mb explains why they're not as frustrated at it (because they're dumb) -- this game seems to have some v devoted fans. maybe all games do once you google them, i don't know.

grim fandango. i can't work out if i like it or not.

i mean if i don't like it i think that just means i don't like the classical adventure game, i can't see how it could be done better w/o actually doing smth else

you're probably right

adventure games as storytelling device are really weird. like it seems totally historically contingent that at one point we had this big-deal genre based on the idea of a plot which we're meant to care about which is arbitrarily held up while we're working out recherche object combinations, they only happened because the text adventure was a thing and the text adventure only happened because it was easy to code

the puzzles in grim are pretty ok. i like the design of the getting-hold-of-the-photo puzzle in rubacava, how it repays you for looking at everything and talking to everyone but not in a mechanical fashion. the bits of the chain i cheated one i immediately kicked myself for having forgotten about. i really hated and immediately cheated on the two anchor puzzle at the start of part three, that one sucked.

i think you could argue that the internet, with the instant gratification of an answer to any simple question, has rendered the adventure game as valid as your self-control lets it be